Category Archives: CCA

Looks like Horry County, SC stuck to its
initial three-year offer, both for Lofton, and for millage
to fund his development authority there.
There are things the
newly-renamed Valdosta-Lowndes Development Authority
could do to let sunshine turn Lofton’s local land legacy green.

Indefatigable reporter gets FBI to investigate profiteering
private prison company: again.
CCA already
lost the contract for Idaho State Prison and two other CCA prisons have closed.
Maybe this time the FBI will shut CCA down.

The FBI has launched an investigation of the Corrections Corporation
of America over the company’s running of an Idaho prison with a
reputation so violent that inmates dubbed it “Gladiator School.”

The Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA has operated Idaho’s largest prison
for more than a decade, but last year, CCA officials acknowledged it
had understaffed the Idaho Correctional Center by thousands of hours
in violation of the state contract. CCA also said employees
falsified reports to cover up the vacancies. The announcement came
after an Associated Press investigation showed CCA sometimes listed
guards as working 48 hours straight to meet minimum staffing
requirements.

The Idaho State Police was asked to investigate the company last
year but didn’t, until Continue reading →

Noemi Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 3, was arrested
in January working at a Phoenix grocery store, where she used
someone else’s name to get the job.

Romero, a 21-year-old who likes to draw and dance, spent the next
four months behind bars, almost half of it in a cramped cell at a
1,596-bed detention center in Eloy, Arizona, run by Corrections
Corp. of America. The company, with Geo Group Inc. (GEO) and other
for-profit prison operators, holds almost two-thirds of all
immigrants detained each day in federally funded prisons as they
face deportation, U.S. data show.

“For CCA staff to lie on so basic a point — whether an officer is
actually at a post — leaves the Court with serious concerns about
compliance in other respects, such as whether every violent incident
is reported.”

GBI finally released video of prisoners being beaten with hammers by guards
after the
2010 prisoner strikes
for wages
instead of working for free for things like
call centers and building weapons.
Two guards
pled guilty in 2012
to conspiracy, assault with injury, and coverup.
But GBI mysteriously hasn’t been able to identify
the guard seen in this video beating handcuffed prisoner Kelvin Stevenson
with a hammer.

At the beginning of this video, you hear a prison guard shouting,
“”Get down! Just get down! Get down! Get down!”
presumably to the other prisoners. That exclamation is followed by,
“Oh (inaudible) guy over there with his hands hitting him …
and a damn hammer!”

As reported on Monday, the computer hacking collective known as
Anonymous Analytics published a blog warning investors that a
declining prison population and reforms designed to reduce
incarceration rates in the U.S. point to shrinking revenue for
Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE: CXW) going forward.

We could have slipped down this slippery slope with
that proposed CCA private prison,
down to where Casa Grande Arizona is, inviting CCA’s
guards and dogs into our schools to collect our children as
private prison customers.

Drug sweeps of schools are not uncommon occurrences in the recent
past in America, much to the chagrin of civil rights advocates, who
see such sweeps as an efficient means of diverting certain kids to
prison — in some cases, even before they make it to
adolescence, via the much-criticized
“school-to-prison pipeline”.
What was unusual about this particular raid, however, is that, among
the team of law enforcement personnel and canines put together by
the local Casa Grande police department, there were prison guards
employed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the
country’s largest for-profit prison company, which owns and operates
several prisons in the area. CCA was also kind enough to provide
their sniffer dogs for the raid.

What’s even more unusual about this is that pretty much nobody in a
position of authority in and around Casa Grande seems to think
there’s anything wrong with that.

That’s where “jobs, jobs, jobs” with no consideration of the consequences
leads you.
Some jobs are not worth having.
Private prison jobs are among them.

The state of Georgia spends a billion dollars a year locking people up,
many of them for minor drug offenses, and around 85% of them for
drug-related offenses.
What if instead we spent a fraction of that money on drug counselling
and mental health care, and the rest on public education?
Then we’d have healthier people more prepared for real jobs.

And it wasn’t even close:
2,152,091 to 1,526,959 (58.50% to 41.50%).
Lowndes County went for the Atlanta-power-grab “charter school” amendment
18,606 to 17,619 (51.36% to 48.64%).
The voters of Georgia just sold their children’s educational
birthright for a mess of slick brochures.

This week, Moyers & Company (check local listings) presents
“United States of ALEC,” a report on the most
influential corporate-funded political force most of America has
never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange
Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful
corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan
public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a
vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to
increase corporate profits at public expense without public
knowledge.